Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday May 28, 2010 @12:44PM
from the pacer-meets-battlestar-galactica dept.

Jalopnik has a piece on a mostly forgotten piece of automotive history: the US government built a fleet of ultra-safe cars in the 1970s. The "RSV" cars were designed to keep four passengers safe in a front or side collision at 50 mph (80 kph) — without seat belts — and they got 32 miles to the gallon. They had front and side airbags, anti-lock brakes, and gull-wing doors. Lorne Greene was hired to flack for the program. All this was quickly dismantled in the Reagan years, and in 1990 the mothballed cars were all destroyed, though two prototypes survived in private hands. "Then-NHTSA chief Jerry Curry [in 1990] contended the vehicles were obsolete, and that anyone who could have learned something from them had done so by then. Claybrook, the NHTSA chief who'd overseen the RSV cars through 1980, told Congress the destruction compared to the Nazis burning books. ... 'I thought they were intentionally destroying the evidence that you could do much better,' said [the manager of one of the vehicles' manufacturers]."

By our standards, it's certainly not the most attractive car ever, but you gotta' remember: it was the 70's. Most non-luxury cars from that area, and some of the luxury ones, will set your retinas on fire they're so ugly. For their time, these look pretty good.

I thought the same thing. I first thought of the gremlin, but when I looked it up, I saw that it wasn't rounded enough. I remembered a really nice looking undergrad that worked in our lab in graduate school. She seemed very unapproachable except that she drove a Pacer. So that meant we could make fun of her and she suddenly seemed human again.

Just look at the near fanatical destruction of the blueprints and prototypes of the canadian supersonic Avro Arrow combat jet back in the 50's. This car design getting buried is clearly another case of someone not wanting anyone to manufacture a competing model that could shake the current makers out of their lowest common denominator complacency.

How does that make sense? The conspiracy required for the type of scheme you're describing would mean that the Japanese, American, Korean, and European automakers would all have to be colluding to keep this stuff out of their vehicles. It's also why imports have been routing American cars for so many years -- they've had a lot more of this kind of stuff than American cars. Though one possible reason for that is that they have more money to throw around, since it costs a lot more to design and build a car in the US, thanks to the UAW.

This may finally be changing thanks to Ford, whose new Focus and Mustang are both noteworthy accomplishments in terms of features, performance, and safety, but I don't buy the argument that 'the government should've been in the car business all along and a Reagan/Republican/Auto company conspiracy is the only reason they weren't.'

There have been (and still are) a lot of government-run car companies over the years. You won't see many of the cars they produce today because they're typically totalitarian and/or socialist regimes that make them, and they're usually rubbish. The auto industry in the US (and in most of the industrialized world) is very heavily regulated, with a couple thousand dollars added to the cost of most cars to pay for all the stuff we're requiring the auto companies to do over the next few years. That's not a bad trade-off for a lot of people.

I bought my first real car in 2002, sold it in 2004 to move to NYC, and just bought a new car a couple months ago after leaving the city. It's amazing how much has changed just in that time. Up until very recently, I would never have thought of buying an American car (I never have) but hopefully that will change, though I suspect it'll be Ford and not GM driving that change.

Do some research at what the Big Three did to Tucker in the late 40's. He had a car that would do 120 mph, a rear-mounted H-6 engine--like what Subaru uses--that weighed only 300 lbs and had 116 bhp and 372 ft-lbs of torque, 0-60 times around 10 secs, got 20 mpg, had disk brakes, 4-wheel independent suspension, and great aerodynamics--drag coefficient of.27, along with many major safety innovations.

Tucker was decades ahead of his of time in car design and features. He envisioned 15 minute engine swaps if you had engine problems.

My old man lived in Michigan during that time and had brothers living and working in the Detroit car business. They all swore the Big 3 ran Tucker out of business, and were still talking about what happened to Tucker in the 60's. That's how I learned about Tucker automobiles as 10 year old kid.

Actually, Tucker was accused of fraud. He was operating on a shoe-string, compared to the Big 3, and some minor problems with his display model were blown way out of proportion. Then he was accused of insider stock trading by the SEC, which was never proven even though they tried him more than once. It was dirty politics all the way as his major political opponent, who pushed for all the investigations, was a Senator from Michigan with close ties to the Big 3.

Though one possible reason for that is that they have more money to throw around, since it costs a lot more to design and build a car in the US, thanks to - out of control executive compensation.

There. Fixed that for you.

There have been (and still are) a lot of government-run car companies over the years. You won't see many of the cars they produce today because they're typically totalitarian and/or socialist regimes that make them, and they're usually rubbish.

Because if you had blueprints to a car from the '70s that blows modern cars away in even one or two respects, you'd totally burn them "to protect the status quo" instead of using them to give you a massive commercial advantage and let you retire on a fat mattress stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.

If you look into the history of the Arrow, you'll find that the soviets had infiltrated Avro pretty heavily and the secrets they stole including specific Titanium parts appeared in the MiG-25.

So if you want to talk conspiracy theory at least get the right one.

If you want to talk about shaking folks out of complacency and need a plane analogy try Burt Rutan's Starship, first plane to be built with Carbon Fiber, All Glass cockpit, typical Rutan Wings, Winglets, Pusher Props and Canards... FAA wouldn't certify the plane for years, and now everybody uses some or all of these technologies.

For Car analogies try all the Big 3 and other car companies that told Elon Musk of Tesla motors he couldn't build a full electric vehicle, because they couldn't do it. Toyota (Prius and Electric RAV4) just gave Tesla $50 million to help Toyota with their new electric vehicles.

Nobody in the 1970s was all that interested in a "safe" car except maybe a very small minority. And while these cars might have been safe, nobody is talking about what they cost or what sort of performance they had.

The "right" thing probably would have been for the US Government to nationalize the Big Three automakers and mandate that nobody could buy anything except an official US Government produced car. They could have then made the cars safe and high mileage. Nobody would have anything to compare them to and if they cost $50,000 each that would have just further reduced the dependence on automobiles. The could have used the highways right-of-way for rail lines and torn up most of the concrete.

All we really need is a truely benvolent dictator to tell us what the right way is and shove it down everyone's throats. We might actually be on the road to that, especially if the carbon tax goes through. We won't have to worry about consumer choice anymore - all of those complex decisions will be made for us.

Be careful what you wish for, in a Progressive/Liberal government world you just might get it.

Oh gimme a fucking break. A couple of safety or mileage regulations do not equate to a government takeover of all of society and dictatorship installed in place of elected government. You people have been listening to too much Glenn Beck. Knock it off!

Stalin and Hitler were not all that far to the left/right but they were both about the same level of authoritarian. go look them up on the chart. Its not a left/right false dialemma its a 2D system not a 1D spectrum; the best model is 2D and we only hurt ourselves trying to cram a 1D line into a 2D plane without losing a great deal of IMPORTANT information.

The VW was mandated by Hitler. And, not to cast aspirations on the left wing of any current political party, but Hitler was a leftist.

He was the head of the National SOCIALIST German Workers Party, which was very left-wing, anti-corporate, by the standards of the day. Of course, that didn't stop Hitler and his band of criminals from charming corporations when it suited their interests. But please, use proper english. "Conservative" and "benevolent" are two words that should never be applied to Adolph Hitler.

Are talking about the guy that smashed the workers organisations, physically eliminated the entire left wing in Germany and wherever he could find them, killed everyone that was even remotely considered to be aligned with the left (writers, artists, intellectuals etc. and in general killed just about everyone who disagreed with him) all the while providing slave labor to corporations who had funded him liberally? Because if you are, i have to wonder if your use of the term "left-wing" actually has any meaning in common with what the rest of the world uses that word for.

And while there certainly is a discussion possible about the leftist sympathies of the rank and file within the SA, the night of the long knives made very sure that those ideas could never become a factor in the party. That fact alone should provide a clue what Hitlers priorities were.

Everything you describe also more or less perfectly describes Stalinist Russia as well. Both Stalin and Hitler merrily killed leftist and intellectuals, broke unions, funneled work, funds, and slaves to corporations controlled by his buddies, and used corporations as an apparatus of the state. The only differences is that Hitler at least kept up the vague pretense that corporations were not state property (they were) while Stalin didn't. It isn't worth getting into a pissing match between who was more

It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.

Here's the first best thing you should know about a private corporation:

A private corporation is not in any way interested in providing you with a good, cheap, modern product. If they could charge you exorbitant prices for a product with poor quality and old technology, slowly pacing it out to generate constant new purchases and maximize their profits they would. The only reason they improve is if they are exposed to competition, and only if there is no cheaper way to block it using market barriers, regulat

Gullwing doors are great. I own a delorean and here are a few things I've noticed.One, I don't have to worry about how close someone parks, I only need 11 inches to open the door.Two, if it is raining, the door tends to keep my seat more dry and myself as there is less movement out of the way of the door to get around and in as you would do with a normal door.

With the engine being mounted in the mid to rear end, you have a firewall that would get pushed into the flat of your back if you are against it assum

"Current cars the engine get's shoved into the firewall which then has a chance to crumple the footwell area that your feet are in."

The engines are up-front to absorb impact energy and function as part of the overall structure. This IMO works very well (I do lots of vehicle salvage and get to cut up wrecks using a Sawzall) and I'd rather have a drivetrain up front than a "trunk". Some engine mounts incorporate aluminum members whose controlled failure absorbs energy while guiding the drivetrain where it should go.

Have a look at large salvage yards if you get the chance. The WAY vehicles behave in crashes is interesting.

Generally agreeing, but... in current cars, the firewall is designed to hold the engine when it gets pushed back in a frontal crash. It is an essential part of a force path leading into the tunnel structure and, via the firewall cross-beams, into the frame side members, thereby keeping the passenger cell intact. If the intrusion goes further than that, the engine is to be deflected at a downward angle, keeping the footwells mostly intakt. There is no real problem there. In fact, conversions from gas to electric, which are missing the front engine, have the problem that this force path is not there any more. That said, I am gray with envy for that Delorean!

Problem is you can't make an apples-to-apples comparison because in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the EPA changed the standards for the mileage test to be more realistic (more stringent).

For example, in the old EPA tests, you could run your test without the air conditioner running even if the car had it. New EPA tests require that the AC is run for a certain portion of the test unless the car doesn't have any AC unit.

Also, in general, engine power outputs have gone up significantly since the 1980s and mid-1990s while keeping the same gas mileage.

So a vehicle that scored 32MPG in the 1970s might only be able to score 20-25 MPG on the new EPA tests.

Unfortunately, so much can affect the actual mileage that such ratings are even still somewhat meaningless. They're really best for comparing cars, not for gauging actual mileage. Changing the estimates only clouds the issue in the way that you describe--making it difficult or impossible to compare current cars to cars prior to the change.

I'd assumed that the old MPG ratings were gamed by manufacturers to reflect higher-than-real-world performance myself. But I've recently been measuring the MPG of my '97 Geo Prizm (set the mileage counter when I fill up, record gallons-to-top at the next fill up, divide first figure by second) and I've been seeing numbers that range from 29 to 37 mpg. If you look at the fueleconomy.gov ratings [fueleconomy.gov], that's not only closer to old rating system, it exceeds it.

When you elect people that axiomatically believe that government can't do anything right, you get people that intentionally do government badly. Whether it's automobile safety, maintaining an a healthy and stable economy, or maintaining worker and environmental safety standards.

You wouldn't hire a janitor that said he was morally opposed to cleanliness and didn't believe that brooms worked. Why would you be shocked when everything goes to hell when you hire someone that says they don't believe government?

It makes sense when you realize that the "clean" janitor screams at you for an hour if you miss the waste basket and introduces a charge to use the bathroom to keep people from making a mess. Oh, and somehow the place doesn't really look any cleaner...

Beyond the basic "what makes you think people who want to run everything will therefore be good at it" question, you big government types need to remember that no matter what you do, the giant rambling apparatus you create *will* later be driven by someone who

If what was developed gets distroyed, or hidden for no apparent reason, other than lobby or corporate pressure than that is TREASON.TREASON is punishable by death...

Since one can not become politician on "competence" only, but on slimyness mostly, one has to accept he fact that the governors are not thinking like sane and technical minded people do... We have to accept this, and then find ways to live with it by regulating it:-) (i love that word)

Really, if you want all this stuff, you can go buy a Passat, or an Accord with a bit lower mileage. That rig from the 70's wouldn't pass emissions tests today, so it would have to get heavier and the mileage would go down. A 70's Honda engine isn't exactly what people are looking for when they need to get on an Interstate, so you couldn't sell them easily either. Giant bumpers are nice until you need to parallel park in Chinatown.

I totally want a Delorean, emotionally, but I'm not actually going to buy one for daily driving - I was in a roll-over accident once; side-opening doors are nice.

Really, though, somebody should FOIA the plans and build a factory and see what happens, any patents have expired. Prove that Reagan's goons were wrong...

You're missing the point. By destroying this or not letting it be produced in the US, it allowed for innovation to be almost entirely to goto the European or Japanese manufacturersNotice that the options you provided didn't include any from a US manufacturer.Which "rig from the '70s" would pass any modern emissions test?

And the giant bumpers quip is also a red herring - there were a dozens of wide, long and difficult to park cars back in the '70s.Did none of their owners eat Chinese restaurant food?

On a recent job I got some insight into current designs on handling gull-wing doors in rollovers. There are loads of concepts to handle the situation now, some of them fascinating exercises in overengineering. I have seen concepts up to explosive bolts to detach the doors...

I've heard of threads getting Godwin'd..... but this one had it in the summary.

Doesn't that, by itself, mean that no further replies are necessary?

by the continuing use and misuse of something a lawyer said in a Usenet post, what, 20 years ago?

A single invocation of a Nazi comparison, in the original post/article no less, is NOT running afoul of the Magic Pixie Dust of the Godwin Line. And it isn't even a comparison to Nazism in general, just an analogy to one particular thing that they did; rewriting history by obfuscating the truth. Some bad things that people do today *gasp* realy can be as bad as some bad things done by Hitler's government; not

Then you don't understand Godwin's Law. Sure actions can be reprehensible. But saying 'You know who else had evidence burnt? Hitler!' means the discussion has suddenly taken on a screeching tone and rational discourse is derailed. Far fetched comparisons to Hitler's regime are not constructive and you have not showed how they are.

Watch the movie: "Who Killed the Electric Car". The original EV1 made by GM in the 1990's had a brilliant design and several very advanced (for it's time) features. not only did they take them all back, they destroyed every one. i, for one, believe the conspiracy. they just don't want us to know how awesome cars can actually be.

Sure, it has all those fancy features, but could it have sold for $10,000 in the 70's? Could it sell for $20,000 now? Did it cost a million per car in the 70's? Cost is an extremely important factor here.

I watched the Reagan administration destroy the large Carter administration solar power program at JPL in 1981, so this does not surprise me at all. They literally did not want any competition for petroleum.

According to them the safety features would add $1800 to a $4000 car. I like that it used radar to keep you from hitting other cars, a feature that has re-emerged in minivans with LADAR. Popular science article from 1980:

Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy. It is disheartening to hear that, once again, politicians supported by industry killed an effort to do what's good for the public interest.

industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy.

Then as a member of a democracy it's your job to make sure that such behavior is not profitable, and good policy is.

What country do you live in that has a democracy? Seriously. Most countries have a republic at best. That system involves voting a member into government based on promises. Then having those promises reneged upon without consequence other than not being re-elected again.

You know what I'd like to see: Politicians sign a binding contract based on their platform promises with clearly defined sanctions for not following them. Sanctions up to and including personal liability.

See? You're abrogating your responsibility (and the privilege) of being the ultimate power in America with your "we don't have a democracy" attitude.

Your voice alters what your representatives see as being in their best self-interest. If the lobbyist's money is talking, you need to talk louder.

binding contract based on their platform promises with clearly defined sanctions for not following them. Sanctions up to and including personal liability.

Already exists. It's called "having to get elected next time". The trick is to make sure you find out what their real agenda is so that they have to campaign on that, instead of letting them carpet-bomb your district with litmus-test issues and fear-mongering.

The problem is that the number of brain dead fuckers who just want the government to give them stuff completely outnumber the rest of us. Therefore all the politicians have to do to get re-elected is to promise more free shit on TV to get elected. It's the people with the money to buy TV ads that have the real voice.

The problem is that the number of brain dead fuckers who just want the government to give them stuff completely outnumber the rest of us. Therefore all the politicians have to do to get re-elected is to promise more free shit on TV to get elected.

Please. There's also a vast number of people (the majority in the South and Midwest) who vote against their financial best interests because Jesus told them to stop abortions.

Switzerland. Because they have referendums which the people can call almost at will. This seems to mean that the politicians are afraid of contradicting their electorate because their decisions can simply be reversed if they accidentally wake up the people. Unfortunately this seems to mean that they still live in the 18th century and are racist and xenophobic as hell so it's not the advert for the benefits of democracy that I like to use.

Newt Gingrich made a "Contract with America". 10 bullet points that he kept on a card on a string around his neck (for the two minutes it took to show it to the cameras that one day).

He totally failed to live up to it, too. But what got him thrown out of office was a scam involving "selling" copies of his book in bulk to people who really just wanted to donate more than the legally allowed amount of money to his campaign.

So contracts and politicians are immiscible. Better to saddle them up daily and ride them with the pointy spurs on until they go where you tell them to.

The lemon laws generally state that the vehicle has to be in the shop N times for M days over X months.

The buyer here was being unreasonable. Electromechanical parts have nonzero failure rates, and the probability of failure is a bathtub curve. The first real-world stresses on a new part and aging are obviously going to be the major causes of faliures.

One part breaking, identified and repaired quickly, covered by warranty, is not a reason to return a vehicle, and certainly not to involve the law. The dealer was totally right not to take it back.

The buyer no doubt lost several thousand dollars in one day by trading it in; while the guy who ended up with a car with 10 miles on it, plus a shakedown, inspection, and rework over and above the factory quality process, at a used-car price, got a screaming deal.

"I'm an American living in the US, I vote Democrat (usually), and I drive a Chevy. So there."

In regards to parent post, your statement simply backs up his. General Motors, the maker of your Chevy, is also the company investigated in the documentary of which parent speaks.

The Saturn EV1 was created by General Motors in response to California's new requirement that a certain amount of new vehicles sold in the state be ELECTRIC vehicles. GM created the EV1 as a precursor for cars they intended to sell. But then GM realized that profits would be low and found it more profitable to simply lobby against the laws and have them changed. They did so...then crushed all the evidence of the technology they had produced(they literally crushed all the EV1s they had leased out)--technology that in today's market would have prevented them needing a bailout (the Saturn EV1 would have been selling like hotcakes a couple of years ago).

This a perfect example of the general stock-holder's preference of "This will be good for us in the long run..." taking the back-seat to "I want my money now!"--a mindset that has driven yet another company into the ground, not to mention completely subverting the lawful, good-intentioned, will of the people (less smog, less reliance on foreign oil, etc).

This sole fact, the entire Saturn EV1 charade, is the main reason I did NOT think GM deserved a bailout. They should have been marketing cars like the EV1 years ago(and NOW!), yet still cling to such over-priced, gimmick-infested cars like the Cobalt. STILL, even after we bailed them out.

Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy.

That might be true, but it's also the case that they understate the technical limitations keeping pure electric vehicles off the road. Some of these (batteries, fuel cells, motors) are only just now reaching into the realm of practicality.

A pure EV using even (relatively) cheap batteries today can suffice for your day to day commuter, recharging at night at home. For long trips trips, there is this concept, the range extending generator trailer [wikipedia.org].

If you need to do that sort of hundreds a mile a day driving, no, EVs are not for you. Under one hundred miles a day, which hits like 90% of most folk's driving, the tech is here now and a number of places have after market kits to convert cars and light trucks. Run you around 20 grand or so plus the donor vehicle you get used, then you decide what flavor of batteries you want to invest in first. Kits for like a ford ranger or chevy s-10 or some sedan, all sorts have been made so far. And you can put together your own generator trailer for that trip to see the relatives, etc., just stop and fillerup like normal at any gas station.

Waiting for the three hundred mile range on batteries and five minute recharge option, that I see people saying all the time, means they really aren't interested in them unless they are a millionaire or close to it and can get like a tesla or something with their toy budget, and you still won't get a five minute recharge.But, 50 -100 mile range and falling into the normal joe sixpack range of cost for a new midrange normal vehicle, you can do it now. You can't do it brand new from some dealer, it will be years and years before they get that cheap, but you *can* do it with the kits.

Not the least of which being the Toyota Corolla, the most popular car of all time. I used to have a Mazda 323 from 1980 or so that got 45 mpg at 55mph or less, which was great until I ruined it by changing the oil and not tightening the plug sufficiently.

And, given the choice between "unimpressive performance" and "living to see your children grow up," it's amazing people continue to be so shortsighted. Investment in vehicle safety could save far more lives than the war on terror.

Lifetime chance of dying in a car accident: 1 in 83Lifetime chance of dying of terrorist acts: 1 in 45,000Lifetime chance of dying of a lightning strike: 1 in 80,000

Many of those improvements have been spent on dragging around safety systems, rather than discarded for better fuel economy.

This is true, and both the rate of vehicle deaths and number of deaths per year has been declining for 20 years.

So how do you translate "unimpressive performance" into "less safe"?

Because if everyone drove a small and light car with a smaller, more fuel efficient engine, we would have less fatalities and much less fuel consumption nationwide. We could also save an immense amount of money on replacing infrastructure, since hauling around 4,000 lb SUVs to get a single person from one place to another has more externalities than just the waste of metal and oil resources. Not to mention the increased danger to other, smaller vehicles.

This is why libertarian movements may be the nail in the coffin of the United States. The more a society refuses to pool easily shared resources, the more costs go up for individuals subjected to each other's externalities, and the more efficiency goes down for the society as a whole. If China can turn one gallon of fuel into a few hundred miles of transport per person, and we can only turn one gallon of fuel into twenty miles per person, guess who wins.

If there was no finite limit to the oil supply, sure. Whoever is more dependent on more finite resources eventually loses, even if you don't run out. If the price of oil went to $500 a barrel, it would basically make America a non-competitive economy, because we would have no cheap, fast way to get our workers to their jobs, or to move resources around our highway system.

No, I'm assuming that will be enormously expensive when all pieces of equipment used to transport and construct new infrastructure use oil as their primary fuel source, and that for every calorie of food consumed in the US, 3500 calories of petroleum are expended to produce, harvest, transport, and process it. In 1970 the ratio was 1 to 1.

That, and the fact that the average American lives tens of miles away from their workplace, and has no way to get there without using a highway. Just project in your head what Sean Hannity would say if, to pull through such a shortage, we needed to legalize bicycles on interstates and put quotas on oil usage to preserve them to build rail stations and non-motorized vehicle lanes. He'd try to get everyone in line to invade Venezuela, which of course will only put off the inevitable and entrench our dependence on foreign resources.

Or by vastly more efficient freight rail services and electric vans with enough range to cover the the majority of Americans who live near urban areas. Last I checked, 70% of the population lived in 3% of the same land mass.

Am i the only guy in the world here who can see that government regulation has contributed to the lack of doctors in the US?

Probably, because you made that up. The US has 2.50 doctors per 1000 people. England has 2.30, and France has 3.3 per 1000 citizens.

I HATE it when people complain how free markets fail and they point to very regulated industries like medicine or banking. I mean the banking industry is the most regulated this side of child porn, yet all those laws and oops still another crises every ten years.

In the 19th Century there were Panics about every ten years. Then there was the Great Depression, and virtually no banking failures until the Savings & Loan scandals of the 80s, which were caused by deregulation of savings and loan banks. The current banking crisis can be directly traced back to repealing Glass Steagall, which was done in 1999 with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Glass Steagall kept the US free of major bank failures for 70 years.

The Canadian Banking system, which is actually regulated, suffered virtually no bank failures, and is now voted the soundest in the world. [reuters.com]

In summary, you are flat wrong. Strong government regulation has a long history of success, because it's the only way you can create a market. Markets depend on rules, just like physics. When the rules are not enforced and not followed, there is too much uncertainty, and that almost always leads to a crash once people return to reality. There can be no accountability without enforcement, and no enforcement without regulation.

I know (from CSX commercials, of all places) that a ton of freight can be moved over four hundred miles with a single gallon of diesel fuel, so I don't think moving a person on multi-stop rail would be much worse than that. I couldn't find any good data on breakdown of usage, but I did find an interesting article h

Is that even real? Most cars from that era I remember hearing about got a solid 8 MPG...

That is in part because most cars from the 70s were running on tremendously inefficient engines - and were rather heavy. The car in question was quite light, and ran on a 4 cylinder Honda engine.

In other words, while many of the Detroit engineers were still looped up on dope and not concerned about terrible mileage, the government managed to find someone with the foresight to build an efficient (and safe) car.

That said, I used to drive a car that was built in Dearborn Michigan in 1978 that got a solid 20mpg. Not bad for a car with a carb.

RTFA - they used a Honda 4 cylinder engine. It probably took 3 minutes to get up to 55mph. And no word on how expensive they would have been to build. I'm guessing that there are a plethora of reasons why they were never built. Remeber, Ford tried to sell a safe car back in the 60s. It didn't sell, but not because people didn't want safe cars, but because it was a really crappy car. As usual, Detroit learned the wrong lesson from that experiance.

Its a well known fact that people from all other countries are consistently killed when attempting to get onto the highway. This natural culling effect is the main reason other nations drive less than their less horse-power challenged American brethren.

As indicated in this thread horse power has doubled over the past 20 years while traffic deaths have gone down. The numbers speak for themselves, horsepower saves lives!

Performance (acceleration) on a low end to mid range car is near the same - or not too far off to make it undriveable... the VW Dasher did 12 seconds 0-60, or 19 with the diesel engine. Not bad for almost FIFTY mpg.

I'd be happy with a bit better performance, and say... 35-45mpg (instead of 40-57mpg) highway... but the car companies seem to have forgotten how to do that...

VW haven't forgotten. I have a ten yr old golf that gets 60+mpg (UK = 50+ US mpg) highway mileage (in real life, tank to tank on long trips) and does 0-60 in about 12s. Looking at the new ones today, I could get 60+ mpg(US), 9.3secs 0-60 and more than 30% extra HP.

The problem is that if you are in the US, you probably can't buy these cars. Someone a few years ago decided that americans didn't want to buy them, so they aren't designed for US regs (or US regs are designed to exclude them in favour of Humme

I think you might be surprised if you look into what the economy commuter cars from the 70s and 80s actually got.

They were lighter, and had smaller/less powerful engines.

"30mpg!" has been about the average for good mileage for a long time now. Every time we hit a new development in engine technology that'll give us a more effecient engine, we either use it to make more horsepower with the same given displacement, or the government mandates some other safety/emissions technology that pulls us right back down again.

I'm not saying that we (well, the auto industry) can't do better. Of course they can. Europe has turbodeisel deathboxes that get 70+ mpg. I'm saying that we, as americans, don't WANT better gas mileage. We want the huge rwd musclecar with the 7liter V8, or the tricked out awd import pushing 21psi through what might otherwise be an effecient 4banger.

Note, My father did own one of those "8mpg" 70s cars. It was a 71 challenger with a built 440 with a radical cam and solid lifters in it. it had about 500hp BEFORE the 300hp nitrous shot, and it had 4.90 gears in back. If you know anything about cars, you know that the above is about as bad a reciepe you can have for gas mileage short of towing a boat behind it (which he also did. my dad was a crazy guy), and it took all that to get down to 8mpg.

VW lupo-vs-the lady in the ford expedition that she bought so she could feel "safe" on the road

=

healthy dent on the expedition and horrible crushed doom to the lupo.

Have you seen american highways lately? people who can't drive their way out of a paper bag are routinely crusing around in 3 ton tanks, and you have to be in another 3 ton tank to survive the impact with them.

Ah, the 'SUVs are safer' myth.

Did you know that since SUVs are so much more likely to roll over, you actually lose all the safety benefit and are actually in more danger? It takes two cars to collide, it only takes one SUV to roll over.

Also, they have pretty stringent crash safety standards in Europe where gas is so expensive ($7/gallon last time I checked) that nobody but wealthy egotists can afford to drive gas-guzzling oversized vehicles that are too big for European city streets anyway. (Does Ford even sell the Expedition in Europe?) Get into a collision in Europe and it's more likely to be with another small car.

So the description of European cars as 'deathboxes' is a load of nonsense.

Except that the VW Lupo would likely avoid the accident since it's more agile on the road.

My brother's truck got rear-ended at a red light by some twat in an Accord or similar who was fiddling with her stereo, bent the bumper and mounts, totaled her car. Got to love having a hitch in the receiver. My grandfather got run over by a bus and lost his leg while waiting for a light on his motorcycle. A VW Lupo lies somewhere in between these, but a lot closer to the motorcycle than a three quarter ton pickup. If you get run over by something gigantic you're a lot more likely to die in it, and it can h

Yeah, I had a '78 Chevy Monza that got 35mpg out on the highway and around 25mpg in town. It was a dog, performance-wise, but other than that I liked that car. It was a 70mph cruiser out on the highway. Much over that and the mpg started dropping off pretty quickly.

I had a 1971 Delta 88, as big a car as anyone might need, turned like a boat, it had an Oldsmobile Rocket 350 engine with a 2 barrel carb that got 11 miles to the gallon in the 1990s when I owned it. I didn't take any special care of it, and drove it like any teenager would.

After the 1973 oil crisis cars got progressively more fuel effiecient, I had a high school buddy with a 1974 Mustang 4 cylinder that still managed a reasonable amount of sportyness.

I remember my dad's VW routinely getting around 30 mpg during the 70s. Previous to the VW's he had from 1970 until 1978 he had a 1964 Chrysler which I think got something in the mid teens to low 20s for MPG.

It amazes me that people have all these funny ideas about old cars all having terrible fuel mileage. A 1953 Plymouth Cranbrook easily could push 32mpg on the highway. Ramblers and Studebakers from the 50's and 60's got between 30 and 40MPG as well. Even cars with V8s weren't always the gas guzzlers they are made out to be. 25MPG with a small block Chevy 350 is no where near unheard of. The trick is matching the power of the engine to the weight of the car. Well, that and keeping the accelerator off th

My 70's Triumph still gets 48mpg. Of course it's a death trap, but its a hoot to drive. The powerplant was based on a 1956 tractor engine. And 30+ years later the automakers crow about 32 mpg efficiency.

No one wore the seat belts at that time anyway (something like 5% when these cars were built). The whole point was to show that it was possible (maybe not economical, but possible) to design a car with features that keep the occupants safe in a highway speed collision so putting the crash test dummies in seat belts would have defeated the purpose.

Yeah...how intensive crash test campaign was performed? How many real world accidents? How much people inside would be stressed from the "advice" not to be in the way of opening airbags? (if they had no restraints...)

You jest, but while "water burning carburetors" are up there with "magnetic ley-line energy", water injection is actually real and practical especially in forced-induction engines [wikipedia.org]. It essentially converts your car engine partially into a steam engine, using the latent heat of vaporisation to cool the high-pressure intake air (increasing thermodynamic efficiency) without lowering the pressure (increasing overall boost and forced induction mechanical efficiency).

The car didn't die "due to libertarians". The car died because it cost too much, drove too slow, and was determined by apparently every car manufacturer in the world to be roughly the equivalent of the Nissan Shitbox [chosun.com].

What has happened is that as manufacturers have found ways to squeeze more power out of their engines, some of that power has been siphoned off to haul around the kinds of safety features this car had. A lot of these kinds of features